SAP aims to lighten up

Exciting is a word not normally associated with SAP, but the company's UK managing director, Steve Rogers, wants to change that. Fresh from his previous post at Business Objects and less than a year into his new role, Rogers has a clear plan to capitalise on the company's virtues, as he exclusively tells ZDNet.co.uk.

Q: What is your background?
A: I originally worked with IBM for about 12 years, always on the front end. [Then] Oracle and then Siebel.

How did you find Siebel?
I have some very fond memories of Siebel but I also did, as everybody did, have some interesting tales. It is a pretty amazing company and it was pretty amazing what Tom [Siebel] managed to achieve. But it will be a Harvard Business School study that a company can go from zero to $2bn (£1.0bn) then from $2bn to $1bn (£500m) in the space of 11 years, and then sell out for $10.66 (£5.42) a share when it was reputed, a short time before, to be worth $30 (£15) a share. It was a real Tales of the Unexpected but [it produced] good software and very, very good people. I joined SAP in October and effectively took over in January.

I understand you are supporting the new MSc in technology introduced by Brunel University. How is that going?
We are not supporting it directly. We take a lot of people straight out of university in Germany, but in the UK we tend not to do that. We take people who have had a bit of experience out there in the marketplace. However, this new course might give us cause to reconsider that. It is not something we have really studied. We are going to look at whether we should do some graduate recruitment into our consulting arm and our IT organisation. We need to look at getting skills out there into the marketplace, because those skills are in high demand.

Do you find there is a shortage of people with the right skills?
What we see is that customers are getting more sophisticated in their use of the technology. The core ERP system, for example, is being used as a sophisticated financial transformational engine, or they may have put in some of the transactional engines that SAP provides. What that means is that the nature of the skills is different. We may be looking for the core ERP skills, but there are plenty of those. What there is slightly fewer of is people with the end-to-end business knowledge for an end-to-end business process as that relates to the SAP solution.

How do you like SAP?
Quite clearly it is a German company and it is founded on  a lot of fundamental German values. In particular, we only sell what we have already built. So in some ways we have missed a bit of a trick there. While I wouldn't dream for a minute to want to suggest that we should sell something we haven't already built, I do think that we don't do as good a job as we might on keeping the customers informed on what we are planning on building.

If you look at some of our American competitors, they do a better job in that area. In fact, if you look at some of our competitors, they probably do too good a job and represent some of the stuff that is just around the corner as being a little closer than it is.

I think that somewhere between the two would, in my opinion, be a quite healthy place to be, so that customers are very clear about what you have got today and what you can switch on and, at the same time, have a pretty clear and exciting vision of what is coming down the road.

I have met with many customers and many partners and we do hide our light under a bushel. We have some customers who still believe that what we do is this core ERP, which we do, but then we haven't done enough about telling people how our product portfolio has expanded.

For example?
I was meeting with Deloitte today and many of our partners, such as Deloitte, still have us in this pigeonhole. That's our fault. We haven't done enough.

So we have real qualities around the engineering, around the product. One or two of our internal processes are, in my view, a little over-engineered. That is because we take the processes that are very important in a software build or an engineering environment and try and take a similar process and use it at the front-end of the business.

And of course, when you are at the front end of the business, you need something that is a little streamlined. That is something we are working on as well, because you have to be more responsive with our customers.

But overall I think we have good people who are focused and committed. It feels like an international company, a very global company. Some of the American companies I have worked for feel very American and pretend they are global.

Why should users get excited about SAP?
If you look at what the vast majority of our customers are trying to do, they are trying to simplify things and get some consistency across their business and do things more quickly. A lot of what we are doing in the development of our products is to address one or all of those areas. From a business perspective, such as a supply chain solution — that can take cost out of the business. Or from a technology perspective, where you have products like, for example, NetWeaver, which I think is one area where we haven't kept our customers as well informed as we should.

There are a lot of customers today, not just ours, who are really struggling trying to work out how they link applications together. So if you look at the end-to-end application framework, with perhaps some SAP, some legacy, some Hyperion, all sorts of stuff, and the challenge of linking all that stuff together is enormous.

I was talking to Anglian Water and they take many of our core applications — ERP, HR, asset management, billing and customer support — and with all of that, there are still tens of applications that we have to interface with.

Today what happens is that the partners manually build codes from each of the applications into the SAP application. Now that is expensive and takes time and energy to maintain. Then, when you upgrade, you have to rebuild some or all of those applications. NetWeaver helps with that. That is one of the areas we have focused on because it reduces cost and complexity. It is a big focus area for us.